So how exactly does the studio manage to pull off one monster winner after the next, Fortune‘s Michal Lev-Ram asked Catmull? […]

When any bunch of Pixar creatives begins a new project, he said, “it always sucks—and I don’t mean that in a self-effacing way. I mean, it always sucks.”

To get beyond that, Catmull relies on what he calls “the brain trust,” a notion that he says he arrived at by accident. The brain trust isn’t one specific cluster of individuals, but rather any group that follows these four golden rules:

1. Nobody can override the director. “Basically we remove the power structure from the room,” he says. “If they know that John [Lasseter, chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios] or I can override the director, then they will enter the room in a defensive way.”

Focused authority eliminates the waste (of all sorts) that happens when people are uncertain who has decision rights, or when people think they can vie for them. With that clarity, people can focus on moving the work forward, instead of jostling for position.

Focused authority also increases the odds that decisions get made, at a healthy pace, and that the final product reflects a single vision, a coherent set of priorities. It’s not a guarantee, but it helps. Without focused authority, the end result can appear like it was designed by committee. Such products can sometimes be good, but they will seldom be great.

“But isn’t Pixar’s ‘brain trust’ essentially a committee?”, you might ask. Not at all. It combines the ideation power of the group with the decision power of the individual leader. It’s the best kind of creative team a product can have.

Read the rest of the article for the main Ed Catmull point that Clifton Leaf wanted to amplify. And for the three other rules Ed Catmull lays out. All insightful.

I spoke this week to a longtime former senior Volkswagen executive, who agreed that a scandal, especially one involving emissions, was all but inevitable at Volkswagen. He cited the company’s isolation, its clannish board and a deep-rooted hostility to environmental regulations among its engineers. […]

The Volkswagen board has been especially slow to move on environmental issues, investing less in electric and hybrid engine technology than industry leaders.

Sounds like a company that will have trouble with the curve (pictured here).

Insightful article by Eva Dou, for the WSJ, titled Rivals Try to Reinvent Xiaomi Business Model. I think the use of the word “reinvent” is almost meant to be ironic; you won’t find any hint of reinvention from the executives that Dou interviewed. Some nuggets:

In a hint of how quickly Lenovo has worked to develop a Xiaomi rival, Mr. Chang said his team was still figuring out what the [Lenovo brand] name ZUK stands for.

and

One morning this summer, hundreds of young engineers at Wingtech in blue cubicles and humming research stations were busy designing and testing smartphones for clients. Large clients such as Xiaomi and Huawei were cloistered into private rooms, to avoid secrets leaking to rivals. But testing equipment was shared, cutting costs for all the brands.

After reading these passages, what do you think the odds are that any one company’s business model or product will be different than the others’? Low. One alternative path forward: caring about consumers and the technology it takes to build better product experiences. Don’t recall if the executives interviewed used any variation of either word? They didn’t. And that leads us to the prediction:

IHS iSuppli China Research head Kevin Wang said […] “A lot of these smartphone players are probably going to die.”

Basically, some Chinese OEMs hope imitation can lead to differentiation. It won’t.

HTC has trouble making a profit. That’s because it doesn’t have any sort of advantage. And it doesn’t have any sort of advantage because it fragmented its resources, for years. It probably did that because it didn’t have an identity. It began as a company that built phones for others’ brands and evolved into an intermediary between component vendors, OS makers, and operators. It never seriously sought to control the fundamental technology, deliver product directly to consumers, or build exceptional manufacturing.

That drive to do something different — critical to identity – never existed at HTC, at least not in its leaders. HTC existed, like many companies, to make money. Ironically, that makes it harder to make money. Because without a drive for technology control, customer interaction, or manufacturing excellence, it’s very hard to undertake something unique – to deliver differentiated products, to serve some customers especially well, or to deliver the same product but at a superior cost. I’d never blame the employees. I’m sure they were eager to fulfill a good mission and follow a good strategy.

Allow me to illustrate HTC’s situation. The slides below show how companies can compete and how critical it is to build a sustainable advantage. I’ve found this view, based on Michael Porter’s work, very valuable. Precise positioning of companies on this view is tricky, so think of it this way: if you’re not at an extreme (left, right, bottom), you can’t make money. Even the companies that aren’t fully “stuck in the middle” have trouble, but I’ll leave that discussion for another day.

Back to the issue of resource focus: It took HTC until 2012 — that’s five years after Apple had announced the iPhone — to focus its R&D on a flagship device, the HTC “One”. But it was a false focus. “One” products were, ironically, many. And HTC kept fragmenting its R&D by continuing to launch mid-tier and low-tier smartphones.

HTC didn’t want to focus on (commit to) differentiated products. And it didn’t want to commit to building a low cost advantage. (It’s not alone in this: count BlackBerry, Nokia, Motorola, Microsoft and others in this camp. In a nutshell, if you don’t control key hardware, software, or manufacturing (at-scale), you find it hard to commit to any direction – they’re all hard.)

The visible slide down (in HTC’s financial performance) started in 2011 when the iPhone reached Sprint, a key HTC customer. By 2013, the end was a foregone conclusion (its financial resources and installed base were critically low), and now we’re seeing its last gasps. The end is likely near. I wish all of its employees the best of luck. I hope they can find a place and a role where they can thrive.

As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” […]

We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant. […]

What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main internet products contained in Alphabet instead. What do we mean by far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences [and] Calico (focused on longevity). Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related. […]

Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things. Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort. We are also stoked about growing our investment arms, Ventures and Capital, as part of this new structure.

If anything communicates Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s desire to move beyond search, this action does. Role clarity and organizational clarity both help in the pursuit of new opportunities. They’re not sufficient, obviously, but they’re useful. And clarity often leads to better focus or speed.

As Google Alphabet seeks to find and capitalize on another large-scale opportunity, it’s good to see that Larry and Sergey aren’t afraid to make changes, or pursue ideas, that other companies might avoid.

Expect other changes to happen at the business unit level and below, as leaders at different levels imprint more of their vision and goals on their organizations. Should apply to both mature and exploration-focused business units.

______

Update (August 11): Initially, I listed only 3 business units under Alphabet: Google, Ventures, and Capital. I corrected this error.

Xiaomi and Huawei’s strategy is expected to directly impact AP providers such as MediaTek and Qualcomm. Within the global top-5 smartphone vendors, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi and LG, which together contribute over 60% of worldwide shipments, four of them have already adopted in-house developed APs or have been aggressively increasing their adoption, which could seriously damage independent ARM-AP suppliers as well as x86-based solution supplier Intel.

4. Michael Lopp (Rands in Repose): “Busy is a bug, not a feature.” I suppose it depends on the role. I agree that for a leader to be continuously busy, or “too busy”, is not a good sign. Though it is more complicated than that (“war time” vs. “peace time”, etc.). Michael is now at Pinterest. Another interesting part:

“It’s gonna sound like I’m lazy but I swear I’m not lazy,” he says. “My job is to get myself out of a job. I’m aggressively pushing things I think I could be really good at and should actually maybe own to someone else who’s gonna get a ‘B’ at it. But they’re gonna get the opportunity to go do that [and continue to learn in the process]. My job is to — it sounds like I just want to sit here and drink coffee and talk about bread — but it’s about pushing it down, so these things, which naturally come to me [go to others in the company].”

I have some travel coming up, and within seconds—literally—of asking Cortana some questions, I was able to check the weather forecast for my destination, find a handful of restaurants around my hotel, and find out what kind of facilities are offered there. I also quickly found a couple of specific recipes online, search for some images, launched some applications, and added a handful of reminders to my calendar. I even had Cortana remind me to get up and walk around every couple of hours, so I wasn’t glued to my office chair for too long each day.

I’m looking forward to trying it out. The first system-wide assistant on a large-scale OS.

The tiny infrared detector is effectively a smarter, more connected pedestrian traffic sensor: it tells apps how many people are entering or leaving a building at any moment, giving you a good sense of whether that restaurant is packed or blissfully empty.

“I don’t tweet, mainly because I’ve noticed that some of the other people with jobs like mine have either ended up doing all promotional tweets, which is boring, or writing something half-thought-out that would be better used in a more considered piece of writing,” he told Business Insider.

Philip Mudd is accustomed to making tough decisions. As the former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and FBI’s National Security Branch, he has gathered information and made recommendations about some of the world’s biggest threats to national safety. […]

Mudd breaks down his decision-making process into five steps:

1. FIND THE REAL QUESTION
People often focus on the wrong question because they assume questions are self-evident, says Mudd. Focusing on better questions up front yields better answers later.

“Good questions are hard to come up with,” he says. “We typically overinvest our time in analyzing problems by jumping right to the data and the conclusions, while under-investing in thinking about exactly what it is we want to know.”

Mediocre VCs want to see that your company has traction, top VCs want you to show them you can invent the future. […]

The key to investing is to be aggressive and to fight your instinct to pattern-match (“breakthrough ideas look crazy”). If history has taught us anything, it’s that so much of the future is unpredictable despite our best efforts to analyse current trends and extrapolate future outcomes from them.

Samsung used to have one killer draw: Its premium, big-screen devices. It offered a smartphone experience that even Apple — with its paltry-size iPhones, at least until 2014 — couldn’t match. But then the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus came out, and those phone have consistently stolen share from Samsung. The Cupertino company enjoyed the most profitable quarter of any company ever, while Samsung’s profits cratered.

There’s very little incentive for someone to buy a $650 Samsung phone over a $300 Xiaomi phone, especially in developing countries like China where most people can’t afford a high-end phones. And if someone does want to spend $650 or more, they’re better off buying an iPhone, which has a unique experience you can’t find on other phones. In fact, Apple has been crushing it in China since releasing the new big-screen iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

These two drivers, in a nutshell, are behind Samsung’s recent decline. It lost its big-display advantage, and low-cost Chinese and Indian vendors have improved their quality, offering consumers higher value for the price. Additionally, it discarded two of its differentiators (removable battery, memory card slot) without replacing them with anything compelling. And it kept two additional ones (curved display, waterproof-ness) exclusive to other models. It stripped and divided its advantages.

And there are some deeper reasons for this

More importantly, though, Samsung didn’t build a consumer base as loyal as Apple’s. It had better products than some competitors, but often suffered from feature bloat, poor features, or complexity. So, while Apple retained loyal users even when it lacked big displays, and even when rivals offered good-enough alternatives, Samsung hasn’t been able to do the same. (At least not to the same degree.) And so now, when the company’s Galaxy S6 is lackluster, and when it hadn’t manufactured enough curved display Edge models, it didn’t have the loyal consumer base to survive unscathed. There’s a reason why Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned the term “switchers” (consumers switching to Apple) in the last Apple earnings call: Samsung and other mobile handset companies have failed to build meaningful loyalty in their high-value consumers.

Poor product management doesn’t linger for years without poor leadership

And there are some deeper reasons for this. The first: poor product management. Too many features, too little product definition. But poor product management doesn’t linger for years without poor leadership. And that is the root cause of Samsung’s decline. Poor leadership allowed the mis-use of Samsung’s capabilities:

A VP Engineering is ideally a great manager and a great team builder. He or she will be an excellent recruiter, a great communicator, and a great issue resolver. The VP Eng’s job is to make everyone in the engineering organization successful and he or she needs to fix the issues that are getting in the way of success.

A CTO is ideally the strongest technologist in the organization. He or she will be an architect, a thinker, a researcher, a tester and a tinkerer. The CTO is often the technical co-founder if there is one (and you know I think there must be one).

When a company has a strong CTO and a strong VP Engineering that trust, respect, and like each other, you have a winning formula. The CTO makes sure the technical approach is correct and the VP Engineering makes sure the team is correct. They are yin and yang.

For me, it’s been a browser tab that I didn’t want to close. It’s because leadership – successes and failures by the senior leadership team – are really interesting. They shape products, which in turn shape people’s lives, and shape companies. Or, alternatively, they fail to do so.

In reading Ben’s piece, it’s important to distinguish between times when the CEO shares his/her detailed reasoning and the values driving a decision, vs. taking the time for one-on-one development. The former happens all the time and, in one sense, it’s a type of “development”. The one-on-one kind – what Ben is addressing – isn’t something the CEO can afford to spend time on, directly. Instead, on the issue of executive skills, the CEO’s time is better spent upstream — in hiring. (A good use of any leader’s time, to say the least.) Bold emphasis below is Ben’s.

My greatest disappointment as CEO was the day I realized that helping my executives develop their skill sets was a bad idea. Up to that point in my career, I prided myself on my ability to develop people and get the most out of them. In my jobs running product management, product marketing and engineering, developing young talent was the most rewarding part of the job. Helping them learn to manage, improve their judgment and be more effective in their domains made my organizations better, and people genuinely appreciated the effort. […]

Executives are compensated for their existing ability, and therefore should not be evaluated on their potential. While it’s common practice and a good idea to take potential into account with regular employees, this methodology does not work well for executives. When you hire an executive, he will demand around 1 percent of the company. How do you explain to a great engineer with less than one-fifth that amount of stock that you are waiting for the executive’s potential to kick in?

At any given point in time,
there is usually a single constraint or bottleneck holding you back.
Identify it correctly, and you can move mountains.
Miss it, and you’ll be endlessly scaling small hills.

Spend 5 mins at the start and end of every day to identify your single domino.

Sometimes, in work, we assume there’s “just no way” through our biggest constraint. So we accept it, sometimes without even realizing it, and address other constraints. But the odds are high that someone else has solved the same problem that’s blocking us the most. It’s worth the research time and/or price (e.g., if you need to buy the app/service/tool you need).

Depending on the scale you’re working on, sometimes the “tool” you need is expertise. Who’s *the* person — even if you don’t know them — who could solve your problem? What’s the downside of contacting them? Embarrassment doesn’t count.